[Phalaris1913]

PART TWO

It's 15 years later. I no longer live in Phoenix. My husband and I bought five acres in a tiny town in rural New Mexico, partly to better house my racing library and partly to make it possible for me to pursue the dream of having a horse again.
When I set out last year to look for a horse, I have to admit to you all that I never considered adopting a former racehorse. My previous experience was a lesson to me: a lesson that I am not good enough to safely manage a typical young thoroughbred without close guidance, a lesson that I have no interest in the confines of formal showring riding. A lesson about a lot of things, including how expensive it is to have a horse and how committed you have to be before you should embark upon it.

As the economy started to struggle last year, there arose a desperation to unload horses. I know, because I've been patiently watching the market for a while. If you live in a rural area like mine, you probably heard local news stories about people letting horses loose. Where I live, people have large properties and historically have large numbers of livestock so many horse owners have many horses. Last summer, there was even an article in the local weekly paper about an owner saying that if she couldn't sell some number of the horses she had advertised for sale that she was going to put them down. There's a well-publicized story here in NM about someone taking a horse out into the desert and shooting it in the head several times - only to have it survive and wander onto someone's property in time to be saved. The price of hay was already up, then the gas crunch made it worse. Everywhere, people were dropping prices just to get horses sold.

In this scenario, where the dwindling number of people who actually have space and horse knowhow that might have been able to rescue racehorses were struggling to even keep the horses they already had, the prospect of racehorse rescue looked almost quixotic to me. There are 35,000+ thoroughbreds born every year in the United States alone. Where are the homes?
My five acres? Well, my five acres doesn't even have one horse on it. I took a look at the costs even of keeping one horse on my empty property and as the economy crashed around us last fall, my husband and I realized that the dream of horse ownership will just have to wait for another day.

Rescuing racehorses is a noble goal, but I'm out here on the front lines wondering not how but if it can be reasonably done in numbers that can make a difference.